The fourth installment of Ubisoft’s Rayman series is certainly different from the previous ones. The platformer genre has been left behind for a collection of minigames. While there are many good things about Rayman: Raving Rabbids, there are some not so great things as well.

Gameplay

The game consists of a single player “story” mode where you play Rayman, who has been kidnapped by a bunch of crazy rabbits (Rabbids). They have imprisioned Rayman and put him through these tests (minigames) every day.

There are about 70 different minigames in the game, with some being harder or different version of the same basic minigame. Each game uses the Wii Remote in a different fashion. All the controls feel pretty intuitive and natural, so the concept works pretty well. It’s pretty funny too, as the Rabbids are pretty NUTS IN THE FACE.

Graphics

The art in the game is great; the Rabbids are well modeled and definitely look crazy. There is a definite cartoony kind of feel to the style — think Earthworm Jim (there’s even cow launching!).

Sound

The sounds the bunnies make is usually one of the funniest parts of any given game. There’s one part where the bunnies are in outhouses and don’t like to keep the doors closed. The bathroom noises they make alone get the sound category two thumbs up.

Multiplayer

This is the area that I think hurt this game the most. It could have been worlds better than it was. The multiplayer mode was basically just competing against your friends in the same minigames that you play in story mode. Most of the minigames aren’t played simultaneously, but one after the other, which causes the pace of multiplayer mode to be pretty slow. You’re just competing to beat the score of the other person.

3rd party developers did not yet have the Nintendo Wi-Fi libraries when this game was made, so there is no network connectivity, which really hurt Rayman. When you get a good score in a game, they give you a code consisting of a random string of characters, that you can enter on Ubisoft’s website to record your score on the internet and compete with anyone in the world. This type of system really takes away from the game. Who wants to write down a random number and then go enter it on some website? That’s right, nobody. Especially when you’re using a console that’s got network connectivity built in. I would’ve had them wait for the Wi-Fi libraries and then just integrate the global high scoring system in the game. That would’ve helped their replay value…which brings me to the last category.

Replay Value

I think the replay value on this game is fairly low for several reasons. First of all, the aforementioned lack of a network enabled in-game high score system. And second, the multiplayer mode just isn’t robust enough to keep it entertaining for more than a few hours at best. The single player story mode is also pretty easy and not really all that long.

Final Thoughts

I think Ubisoft has a pretty solid game for what it is. I personally would’ve liked a more robust, longer, and harder (that’s what she said!) game. The multiplayer also wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be. But all in all, it’s a very funny game that’s a lot of fun to play…but probably only once unfortunately.

Final Rating

6.5 / 10

If you’re like me, and like to maintain your own blog software, you might have wondered how to get the little Digg counter (like the one to the left here) on your website without having to manually add the Javascript or the Digg URL yourself. I’m talking about the cool ones that show the number of Diggs and let you Digg it right from the page. There’s a WordPress plugin that will do this for you, but for those of us who don’t run WordPress, this isn’t 100% awesome. So here’s a little tutorial on how to easily integrate Digg with your posts automatically.

We’ll be using PHP5 for this specific tutorial, but PHP4 can work too.

Before I get to the code, let me explain the idea a little bit and provide a setup for what you might need to add to your database. Basically what we’re tyring to accomplish is this: You make a post (http://www.mywebsite.com/my-post for example), and someone submits it to Digg and people begin to come to your site from Digg. We want to identify that a person is coming from Digg, and record the Digg url they came from (http://digg.com/category/my-post) if you haven’t already. You’ll probably want to add something like a diggUrl field to your database where you store the information for your posts.

All this is required because the Javascript that you need to add to display the Digg counter requires you provide the Digg url. We don’t want to have to look this up by hand and add it to every post.  We want it all done for us, automagically!

Now, on to the code!

I’m just going to provide the two little functions to accomplish the task and how to use those functions; I’ll let you do the integration with your particular setup (it should be pretty straightforward).

/**
* This function checks the referrer to see if it came from Digg.
* If it did come from Digg, we'll store the URL and use it in the
* Digg javascript to display the counter.
*/
public function checkForDigg()
{
$origRef = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$ref = strtolower($origRef);

// get Digg current URL value from your database.
// will be empty at first;
$diggUrl = '';

// we check to see if the url is blank, and if it is, we check to see
// if it has come from Digg.  Thanks to Aviran Mordo of
// http://www.aviransplace.com for this check.
if ($diggUrl == ” && substr_count($ref, “_”) > 0
&& strpos($ref, “digg.com”) !== false
&& strpos($ref, “?”) == false
&& strpos($ref, “upcoming”) == false &&
(strpos($ref, “digg.com”)==0 ||
strpos($ref, “http://digg.com”)==0 ||
strpos($ref, “www.digg.com”)==0 ||
strpos($ref, “http://www.digg.com”)==0)) {

$diggUrl = $origRef; //the url is from Digg, so it’s the diggUrl

//insert $diggUrl into your database for this post

return $diggUrl; //return $diggUrl so we can pass it to the JS
}
return false; //the referrer was from somewhere else, so we don't care
}

Now we need some code to display the Digg counter on our page.  Below is the really simple function we’ll use to do that.

/**
* This just writes out the Javascript to display the Digg counter
* on our page.
*
* @param string $url The Digg url of the post
*/
public function writeDiggCount($url)
{
print("<script>DIGG_URL = '$url';</script>\n");
print("<script src=\"http://www.digg.com/api/diggthis.js\"></script>\n");
}

The only thing we have left to add is the code we’ll put on our post page to determine whether or not to show the Digg counter.

//$post is an object containing all the post info.
//diggUrl is a public var in that post object

// if the post doesn’t already have a diggUrl we need to check the referrer
if (!$post->diggUrl) {
$digg = checkForDigg();

// if $digg came back as something other than false,
// then it came from Digg and we write out the counter
if ($digg != false) {
writeDiggCount($digg);
}
}
else { //otherwise the post has already been Dugg, print the counter
writeDiggCount($post->diggUrl);
}

That’s pretty much it!  Hopefully this will help some people out with adding the Digg counter to their own posts without having a lot of overhead.  Let me know if you have any questions or anything.

I'm sure you've heard all about Google and their new gigantic data center being built in Lenoir, North Carolina (fun fact: Lenior is about 20 minutes from my home town), so I'm not going to go on about that. But according to WRAL, "To keep negotiations quiet, Google resorted to fictitious names." I'm wondering what fictitious names they were using. So I submit to you, the Top 10 Fictious Names Used By Google as Picked By Me:

1. Le Goog…That's French for…the Goog
2. Microsoft
3. El Goog…That's Spanish for…the Goog
4. Ten to the 100th Power Enterprises
   
5. Rainbow Letters, Inc.
6. Giant Finding Apparatus Supply Company
7. Who us?…we're just a regular guy…AND RULER OF OMICRON PERSEI 8!
8. I'm Feeling Lucky Investigations
9. The Internets.com
10. Gürgle

I've had the same site design since May of 2004. That's like a hojillion years in Intarweb time. I figured it was finally time for an overhaul. I've refocused the site on the blog and, hopefully, this will get me to post more regularly. I've also just got the blog up for now; the other sections will be put up really soon. I was just anxious to get it out.

I rewrote all my blog code and completely trashed the old stuff, so if you have any problems or encounter any errors or anything, please let me know. The logo in the header is just a place-holder for now until I make a cooler logo. Hopefully I'll come up with something this week.

Hurray for a new design!!

Let me know what you think!

This year I saw 37 movies in the theater and this year I decided I’ll do my top 7 and my bottom 4 list. Here’s the top list:

• 7. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan – “This suit is black not!”
• 6. Hard Candy – This movie was NUTS IN THE FACE but really very good. Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde in X-men) did an awesome job as a girl getting “seduced” by a pedophile. Great family film.
• 5. Saw III – The latest (not the last) installment of Saw wasn’t quite as awesome as the first two, but it was certainly as twisted. There’s still the big twist that kicks you in the face. I’m still wondering what exactly they’re going to do for Saw IV. The dude said there was going to be another one, so we’ll see I suppose.
• 4. The Hills Have Eyes – Also NUTS IN THE FACE; this was the first horror movie I’ve seen in a long time that showed you just about everything. I don’t think they cut away from anything. Super intense.
• 3. Little Miss Sunshine – We got to see the free sneak preview of this movie and it was great. It’s charming and hilarious. See it now!
• 2. Clerks II – Two words. Donkey show.
• 1. Thank You For Smoking – Also another free sneak preview viewing. This movie was AWESOME and that’s why it’s number one on my list this year. Satire at it’s best.

And now for the worst 5 movies I saw this year:

• 4. Firewall – “I just hacked into your accounts.” This movie wasn’t too bad, but with cheesy lines like that, it definitely makes the bottom five.
• 3. Superman Returns – I’m sure this goes against the consensus, but I thought Superman was dumb. Even being completely accepting of all his Superman abilities and all, it was still unbelievable and over the top.
• 2. Eragon – Probably one of the worst book-to-film adaptations ever. They took approximately one third of the original story, changed that a bit, and then left out the other two thirds entirely. Instead of “based on the novel Eragon by Christopher Paolini” it should have said, “loosely based on the title of the novel Eragon by Christopher Paolini.”
• 1. Ultraviolet – This is probably in the running for worst movie of all time. I posted a bit about it on Day 7 of the road trip postings, but I’ll paste it here for your convenience. “We did go see Ultraviolet though, and that was hilarious. I don’t think it was supposed to be hilarious, but it was. The best idea in the movie was definitely when someone decided that the two people should fight…in the dark…with swords…that are on fire. The people who wrote this, I think, have seen exactly two movies and a trailer in their entire life: Equilibrium, The Matrix, and the trailer for Blade. There wasn’t one original thing in the movie, except for the Gravity Leveler device that let’s you do whatever you want with gravity. It’s this little sphere on a belt buckle that has some lightning stuff inside when they push the button that, one can safely assume, levels gravity. They explain this device very conveniently too. “She must have a gravity leveler!” on character exclaims. “Oh…I see now,” we thought, “it’s perfectly clear now.” Oh, and it’s a vampire movie.”

So there you have it. The top 7 and bottom 4 movies that I saw in the theater this year. As always, feel free to agree with me completely.